wireless network setup - Mac and PC

[robc]

My wife just bought a Mac notebook and I need to set up a wireless network. I currently have a desktop PC right next to a cable modem. The Macbook has a built-in 802.11n and bluetooth 2.0 cards. The uses will be fairly light---e-mail and MS Office applications.

My understanding is that all I need to get the wireless network functioning is a wireless router that has at least 1 extra cable connection in back for the PC. Then the Macbook would use the wireless to connect to the Internet.

My questions: 1. What type of wireless router should I get? 2. The printer is currently hooked up to the PC--Can she plug an external cable into the printer as needed or would I need to include the printer in some configuration of the wireless network? 3. Am I missing anything else?

 

[brntorng]

Check into the Apple Airport Extreme wireless router. It's a piece of cake to manage and includes the ability to plug in USB printers and hard drives for shared network access. Has extra ethernet ports for your PC. It's 802.11N compatible so it will have more than enough bandwidth to grow with your needs. Also, it can operate on the 5GHz band to eliminate interference with all the wireless things that work on 2.4GHz these days. If you're interested, they also have a version with an internal hard drive to use as a Time Machine drive. Time Machine also works with an external drive on the router, but it sounds like it's not "officially" supported although it works fine. I've used one since they came out and it's the best wireless router I've had and I've used Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, etc previously. It's very competitively priced considering all the features and ease of use.

 

[MGS]

1. Any wireless router will work

2. Cross-platform network printing is a pain in the ***. I've had a lot more success with it on a Mac-hosted printer(with Bonjour installed on the windows PCs) The easiest thing to do is just unplug it from the PC and plug it into the Mac when needed.

3. You should be fine